The Flare Path: Ablaze

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… The last time we saw Golovina was on the evening of the 14th. We passed her on the road to Lipsk. She was bringing in a Sd.Kfz 11/5, a real nice example. Said she’d found it “under a gooseberry bush”. There were rumours that a big Kraut convoy had gone down in the wets near Krikštonys, and Golovina and that idiot winchman of hers, had found it. Most magpies steer clear of that part of the world on account of the wisps, but she had balls as big as Tiger turret bearings. She went where she liked. Anything that so much as glimmered at her funny, got a signal flare in the mush …

The Flare Path has been bog angling this week, and our toothy Swamp Hydra has snagged Vietnam ’65, DCS World, Ultimate General: Gettysburg, and Steel Armor: Blaze of War stories.

Released yesterday, Vietnam ’65 [official site] is not a typical piece of historical hexiana. Ingenious, evocative, deceptively simple… it’s a tactical wargame filled with monster cabinets, milk runs and tricky unit purchasing and base placement decisions. Much of the time you’re fighting communist ghosts – guerillas who are far more interested in ambushing, mine-laying and inculcating, than engaging in full-blown pitched battles. The Hueys and Chinooks that buzz around the randomly generated maps aren’t period decor or optional combat luxuries, they are the circulatory system that keep your war effort effervescent.

Though I haven’t had a chance to play the release version yet, the menu screen suggests that Every Single Soldier haven’t slipped in a campaign mode at the eleventh hour. It looks like they haven’t worked out a way to inject more variety into their random maps either. If Vietnam ’65 carried a typical Slitherine/Matrix Games price tag, such shortcomings might have been reasons to burn your draft card and make for Canada. At $10, the surprisingly reasonable RRP, I’d argue they’re merely overlookable (and, hopefully, patchable) annoyances – mild disappointments that you put to the back of your mind while you’re busy massaging hearts and minds, and deluging hillsides with napalm.

Until everything is nailed down for good, attempting a second assessment or nagging Nick for details of UG2 (Shiloh? Sharpsburg? Waterloo? Isandlwana?) seems fairly pointless.

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If you’re an impatient crumpet toaster or a frustrated Maverick impersonator, the latest DCS World [official site] news is guaranteed to seed a smile. Not only has the F-86F Sabre recently gained a formidable sparring partner…

…Leatherneck Simulations, the poly-national perfectionists behinds the MiG-21bis, have announced that a recreation of the seldom-simmed F-14 Tomcat is on the way.

Feature list talk of “highly accurate” avionics, weapons systems, and flight and external models is hardly a surprise. What snags my attentional arrestor hook is the mention of “one free theatre bundled with aircraft” and “JESTER AI – A proprietary AI system for fully voiced, dependable and smart RIO/WSO”. Will our artificial cockpit companions berate, barrack and barf, I wonder? Will we get to buzz the tower at NAS Miramar? We should know by Christmas.

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How exactly does the Steam store’s ‘New on Steam (Featured New Releases)’ list work? I ask because perusing it this morning I couldn’t see any mention of the fact that one of gaming’s most entertaining and ambitious armour sims, trundled onto Steam yesterday.

Steel Armor: Blaze of War [official site], also available at GamersGate, is a true eccentric. It champions Cold War war chariots like the M60 Patton and the T-62, and provides large, deformable Cold War-era battlefields based on genuine Angolan, Afghan, and Iranian/Iraqi real estate.

It can be transformed into a Combat Mission-calibre tactical RTS at the press of a button.

And a marvellous turn-based strategy layer means there’s meaning and uncertainty in every campaign engagement.

In effect a rich, high fidelity tank sim welded to a rich, high fidelity wargame, the unique SABOW unfortunately comes with an interface as rambling and idiosyncratic as its theme. If you’re new to Graviteam games, you’re going to struggle at first. A tooltip-utilizing tutorial mode attempts to teach the basics, but my advice to initiates would be:

* Print out the extensive key list

* Set up some simple scraps with the skirmish generator

* Once you’ve deployed units, rely on the Close Combat-style right-click order list rather than the potentially confusing grid of icons in the lower-right corner of the screen

After a day or two of acclimatisation, the Byzantine GUI will, I promise, start to make sense. You’ll begin to notice and utilize more and more of its powerful features.

Wow, that’s handy, I can get my units to auto-deploy in cover by clicking that icon. That one lets me see individual soldiers on the tac map. If I dab that one, my AFVs will attempt to use roads to reach their destination…

The more comfortable you get with controls, the freer you’ll be to savour SABOW’s potent atmosphere and savage spectacle.

My last campaign – a recreation of Operation Hooper – was a corker. Tracer-laced night engagements between South African Olifants and Ratels, and FAPLA-supporting Cuban-crewed T-62s in the thick of the Angolan bush. Bloody infantry scraps for riverside villages. Desperate retreats across plains patrolled by swooping bomb-burdened Strikemasters … Historical wargaming doesn’t get much more gripping or exotic.

Units in stablemate Graviteam Tactics: Operation Star (aka Achtung Panzer: Operation Star) occasionally exhibited clumsy pathfinding and sometimes seemed a little cavalier during assaults. Though the engine has come a fair distance since my APOPSTAR Wot I Think, the refurbished SABOW suffers from similar issues now and again. Don’t be put off. No-one else is making games like this. Perhaps if we pray and plead hard enough, the Ukrainian devs will eventually give us a WW2 version.

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The Flare Path Foxer

Last week’s foxer was literally littered with literary locales. Only a Pamplona street scene and the site of Dresden abattoir foxed fiction fiends Matchstick, Gusdownup, phlebas, Shiloh, Rorschach617, foop, Smion, Pockets and Halk.

I’m 127 words into my ‘History of PC Wargames’ book and the £2000 advance is already almost gone. I was hoping to get at least the introduction done yesterday, but the discovery of a fascinating scrapbook filled with old wargame adverts put paid to that. See how many of the following ten ad fragments you can identify before getting an uncontrollable urge to DOSBox Steel Panthers or Fields of Glory.

Given my love of 19th century American history and my fascination with the Civil War, I really should love UG:G… but it just doesn’t do it for me. Even with the addition of Shiloh, I don’t think I’d be tempted to fork out on it.

A question for Tim – have you played any of John Tiller’s Vietnam games? If so, is Vietnam ’65 (what you’ve seen of it) comparable in terms of mechanics and flavour?

Vietnam ’65 is nothing like Squad Battles. It’s far more stylized. Combat isn’t the heart of the game. You spend as much time ferrying troops and supplies about, hunting the enemy, and gathering intel from villages. Presence is everything. In my 30-odd years of gaming I’ve not played anything quite like it. Unusually, the trailer is actually quite informative.

Based on what I’ve read about the Vietnam War, it captures the challenge and conveys the flavour of COIN operations pretty well.

Argh. A made me think of Pamplona, but I couldn’t find any image of that particular location anywhere on the internet. In the end decided that it was just vaguely reminiscent of the town hall square and gave up.

Heh, I’ve often thought this. Maybe get GCHQ or CENTCOM to sub-contract some image analysis work to the Flare Path – incidentally, don’t know if this will work, but I was Google Earth-ing North Korea recently like you do, and came across this… copy this into the search box and marvel at the size of those helicopters!

“How exactly does the Steam store’s ‘New on Steam (Featured New Releases)’ list work? I ask because perusing it this morning I couldn’t see any mention of the fact that one of gaming’s most entertaining and ambitious armour sims, trundled onto Steam yesterday.”

It’s actually called “popular new releases”, not “featured.” For no reason I can determine, a detailed simulation of driving T62 tanks through Angola isn’t popular.

At the bottom is a button that says “All New Releases” which does include SA-BOW, but if you check that list on a day TRAINZ decides to vomit a collection of new DLC, then you may have to page down a bit. Although you can use “Show selected types” to display only games and no DLC.

(Unless you mean the big colourful scroll across the top, in which case I have no explanation for the arcane formula required to get there. It seems to neatly bifurcate between big money releases and this week’s multiplayer survival release.)

It’s awesome that there’s a specific wargame-based thread here at RPS but I can barely understand what this fellow is writing. It’s like some strange code of gibberish. Weird. Thankfully there are links I can click on to figure out if any of these games are interesting.